A Book of Dreams Read online

  ‘What is going to happen?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know what will happen. I am convinced that someone in the government knows how important this work is. I think President Eisenhower is the kind of person who would help us, but he may not be able to actually come out and help. I don’t know. I think there is going to be a big battle, but we must be brave.’

  ‘But why is it a battle?’

  He squeezed me and looked into the fire. The flames were pretty. They were in the window too, but if I opened the window they would be gone. I wondered if the hole in the snow would still be warm in the morning.

  ‘It is a battle because I have discovered the Life Energy, Peeps. Orgonomy provides a whole new way of freeing man from the emotional armour he has worn for centuries. But mankind has learned to hate what it loves. Men do not want to be free or healthy, so they attack anybody who says that man can be free and happy. It is an emotional plague that is attacking me, and it is deadly. That is why people are running away. They are afraid.’

  ‘Are you afraid?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  They were sitting in the cabin in front of the fire when the October sun broke through the clouds and sparkled on the dying grass. Peter jumped up and said, ‘Come on, come on. I want to show you something,’ and they trooped out of the cabin and made their way once again up the long hill to the observatory.

  It had rained and they had been cramped inside the cabin for a long time, so it was good to get out and walk vigorously. At the top of the hill they stopped and pressed cupped hands to the observatory’s big picture windows. It was strange for Ed to find Reich’s working place so closed. He would have thought it would be open, welcoming and alive. Yet even if he had come in summer, he might have found many museum-goers coming away confused, feeling as if the museum had no point to it. But here, in the fall, he could look through the reflection of lovely leaves on the big windows inside to the red linoleum floor with rugs and furniture neatly arranged. There were paintings on the wall, many of naked women. Two paintings in particular caught Ed’s eye. One was a picture of a man or a woman holding a child in front of a burning building. He wondered if it reflected some incident in Reich’s life, a tragedy, perhaps. On the other side of the room, hanging over a huge stone fireplace, was another fire picture. This one showed a person sitting in profile in front of a fire. It was hard to tell if it was a man or a woman. He wanted to ask Peter about the fire paintings, but all morning long Peter had been avoiding questions.

  As they slowly moved off the porch, he wondered why Peter had brought them up here again, why he had been so anxious to show them this. Was this what he wanted them to see? The emptiness? Was that what Peter felt? Ed’s reflections were interrupted by Peter’s voice, more excited now, saying, ‘Come on, come on.’ He led them off the road into the woods.

  In glaring October sunshine they followed his voice into the woods, losing sight of each other among swatting swinging branches and spider webs. When the branches stopped flying into him, Ed stopped and looked around. They were standing in the middle of an old dump. Tin cans, old beer cans, glass bottles, old pots, even a broken toilet seat seemed to rise and fall out of the soft brown ground. The others knelt down, pulling away the pine-needled skin of earth and roots. They picked up glasses and bottles of all sizes and shapes. Peter danced around through the broken glass scattering bits of sunlight, his feet occasionally sinking into the thin veil of moss and needles. ‘This is what I wanted to show you,’ he said. ‘This is what I wanted to show you!’

  It gave Ed goose bumps. What was Peter afraid of? Why had he brought them here to this old dump? Did he understand what he was communicating to them? Ed picked up an old porcelain basin and turned it over and over in his hands. A few others had picked up blue Phillip’s Milk of Magnesia bottles and held them up to the sun.

  Crunching over the top of the dump, Peter danced over to Ed and smiled. ‘Hey, isn’t this neat? I bet we could find some really great old bottles if we dug around.’

  ‘Is that all?’ asked Ed.

  Peter looked at him. ‘What do you mean?’ He shrugged and crunched back over the top of the dump.

  Outside, it was getting dark. It was so quiet I could almost hear the wind coming off the top of Saddleback, far away. But the only noise near me was dry empty branches in the birch tree by the steps to the observatory.

  I buckled on my skis in front of the observatory on the shiny, crusted snow. The skis made a scratchy noise until I put them in the path Mummy and I made with the sled. Then I skied down the hill quickly.

  Once I almost fell. If I hurt myself it would be the third bad thing. Oranur was the first and the FDA was the second, and I wanted the third one to come before Christmas. The FDA were quacks who said the accumulator was bad and that Daddy couldn’t let people use it any more. The FDA made people scared too.

  I waited for Daddy at the turn-off to the lower cabin. A few snowflakes started to fall making it even quieter. The skis slipped over the powdery crust. The sound of light snow falling in just darkness was quieter than no snow at all and after a while the noise of Daddy’s car came down the hill. I waved to him as he passed me and skied fast on the dusty red swirling snow all the way home. If I fell it would be the third bad thing.

  Back in the cabin that evening they all sat around the fireplace and watched the flames, nursing strong tea laced with brandy and garnished with flakes of marijuana. There was little talking any more; people were exhausted not only from the tension around Orgonon but from the tensions that come when catharsis or expansion doesn’t. They had been together for nearly three days in this strange energy capitol and their own reserves were dwindling.

  Soaring in the back of their minds was the question of energy, always the energy that seemed to be everywhere. When they had come back to the cabin and started the fire, Ed had noticed that the rock fireplace was painted grey. When he asked Peter d’Errico about the paint, he learned that Dr Reich had the rocks painted grey because he felt that they too exuded this bad energy. Ed sipped his tea thoughtfully. He had heard discussions about Reich’s later years. The notion of Orgone Energy as he understood it seemed dynamic and exciting. What had gone wrong? What did this place do to Reich, his followers and his family? He thought about the painting in the observatory, the one of the burning building, and wondered what it symbolized.

  A gust of wind blew some branches against the side of the building and the sudden noise made everyone jump with fear. Was it a ghost? Ed decided to try to talk to Peter. He began slowly.

  ‘Peter, I know it must be difficult for you to talk about a lot of stuff. But you know, we are all here together and we are all feeling very uptight about the things we don’t understand about your father. It would help us if you could explain, even a little bit, about how you feel about this place. It is very confusing for us….’

  Peter hesitated. ‘What do you want me to tell you about?’ His voice sounded defensive.

  ‘Could you tell us about the fear? We all feel it.’

  Peter watched the fire for a long time before he answered. The flames reflected in his eyeglasses.

  ‘It is very hard to explain,’ he began slowly. ‘There is this fear that comes when people deal with my father. I’m not saying this place is haunted or anything, it is just that strange things happen to people when they come in contact with the work.’

  ‘Do you understand what it is? Could you tell us about it?’ ‘I guess … I guess a lot of it has to do with the sort of cosmic nature of the work. It was so far ahead, so revolutionary, that people are afraid….’

  ‘That’s just it,’ Ed said earnestly, ‘that fear. It might be easier to understand if you could tell us what you are afraid of.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Ed had tried once before to talk with Peter about his feelings, but he always seemed to say what he felt he ought to say. He seemed blocked from his own feelings. ‘You are always talking about what others are
afraid of. But now we are the others and we are here with you. Maybe we could understand what we are afraid of here if you could tell us what you are afraid of.’

  Again for a long time, Peter was still. He drank some tea and shook his head. ‘Well, I don’t know. There are good things and bad things and I guess I really don’t understand them all. Like I’m afraid of monsters in the water.’ He grinned and shook his head. Then he was serious again. ‘There were some really bad things…. Like I showed you bullet holes where people just came up and shot at our sign. I had to wear a whistle around my neck because my father was afraid something might happen to me.’

  ‘What? Did anything ever happen? Was someone going to get you or something?’

  Peter turned pale. He finished his tea and put the cup on the floor. ‘I … I really can’t say. It is so confusing. I don’t know if you’d even believe half the stuff that happened. It sounds so incredible. I mean, you’ve already seen the cloudbusters and stuff but it is so … so open-ended, I really don’t know where to begin.

  ‘When I was in France, taking my junior year abroad – funny, it was in October too, in 1963 – I had a motorcycle accident. Dislocated my right shoulder. I had to have gas three times because they had such a hard time getting my shoulder back in. Each time I went under the gas I had the same dream. The amazing thing about this dream was that I was sure I had had it before. The dream was that there were two realities in my life and they were not parallel. They would meet somewhere, sometime, and it would be very scary. That motorcycle accident still haunts me, like the motorcycles in Cocteau’s Orpheus. I’m afraid I’m going to bump into that other dream sometime. Maybe the bad things are in that other dream and I am so afraid of them I can’t remember them. Maybe in a few years. I’m much more sure of the good things.’

  There was silence again. Ed wondered if Peter would ever find out how the two realities came together. Did he know how many realities there were to sort out? Mother–Father, Mother–Son, Father–Son, dream–reality. Ed said, ‘Why don’t you tell us some of the nice things?’

  Peter looked at the fire. ‘Gee, it has been such a long time since I talked about it. There were a lot of really nice things. I really think I had a great childhood.’ He thought for a while, and then he spoke again. ‘Fire. Fires were nice things. In winter, life seemed to revolve around fire. I’d come home from school at night with a Hardy Boys’ mystery and a bag of King Cole Potato Chips and a Pepsi, and finish all three in one sitting in front of the fireplace.

  ‘I used to have a special game with the fire where I’d take a marble and clear a path into the coals underneath the burning logs and roll a marble in. After a few minutes, I’d roll it back out and drop it into a glass of water and watch it crack. They never broke and they were so beautiful….’

  As Peter talked about fire, the fire was reflected in his glasses. It gave Ed the sinking feeling in his stomach that he got when he talked to schizophrenic patients at the hospital. There was a transition point that seemed to come in their talking when in the middle of a conversation they jumped to a different level. They could be talking about a TV show or a ball game and suddenly all the pattern of thought and speech, both conscious and unconscious, merged and they were communicating on two levels. One might start out talking about A and then drift onto B. Then after a while, C would emerge, and C might actually be a statement about the nature of A. The psychologist, Ed felt, had somehow to help the, patient understand the basic pattern of his thinking and learn to read its message. But it was hard: you couldn’t tell, you had to show. He knew Peter’s father had been one of the first to understand that, and here Peter was, sitting in his father’s house, talking about fire and telling how much he loved it. All weekend long he had been telling them, nonverbally, that he was terrified of fire.

  Every time they built a fire he ran over every five minutes to make sure no coals got on the floor; he worried about the oil burner overheating and talked about chimney fires. There were fire extinguishers everywhere and surrounding the stoves were thick asbestos panels. And in the observatory, on the wall opposite the huge stone fireplace, were the paintings: a person holding a child in front of a fire, a solitary figure before a fire. When Peter finished talking, Ed asked, ‘What did your father think about fire?’

  Peter didn’t hesitate. ‘He always said the only colour an artist couldn’t capture was that of a dying fire.’

  After dinner I wanted to surprise Mummy so I said I would do the dishes and she could dry.

  She and Daddy were talking and I wanted them to talk a lot together and be happy so I washed the dishes slowly. When I was through washing they were still talking so I started to dry. Mummy said, ‘Are you ready for me to come and dry?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said, and turned on some water to make it sound like I was still washing. It made me happy to hear them talking together.

  The silverware made a lot of noise so I had to do it piece by piece. It must have been quiet because Mummy said, ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come in and dry yet?’

  ‘Nope, still not done.’ I tried to keep from smiling but I did. They didn’t see me smile though because I turned away quick.

  It made me feel good to see them sitting together by the fire, talking. The fire made them look warm.

  Finally, when I was done I said, ‘Okay, You can come now.’ And when she saw that the dishes were all dried she was so surprised, she hugged me. By the fire, Daddy was smiling. I felt good so I decided to go out and play in the new snow.

  The snow was light and powdery falling out of the sky. I walked away from the house so I wouldn’t break the crust and then I knelt down and used my hand like a saw to cut a round hole out of the crust. It didn’t break. It came out perfectly round, so maybe the third bad thing wouldn’t come at all and we could all not worry and be happy. I lifted the circle of snow crust out like a manhole cover and licked snow off the bottom, where it is best. I wondered if there were still coals glowing up on the hill where Tom and I burned the brush.

  The fire was dying.

  Ed looked around the room and saw that a couple of people had fallen asleep. He realized it was very late. ‘Shall we stop?’ he asked.

  Peter was leaning forward, staring into the fire. He shook his head. Peter d’Errico leaned towards Peter and said, ‘Are you sure you want to go on?’

  Peter nodded. ‘Snow,’ he said. There was a long silence. Someone put a new log on the fire and they watched the flames lick at it. ‘Snow was really something up here in winter. You should really come up here sometime and see Orgonon when there is snow all over everything. Tom used to take his shovel and cut huge tunnels in snowbanks for me and Kathy to play in. I spent a lot of time with Tom. We used to cut brush together and make big fires in the snow. That axe handle right there that we use for a fire poker came off one of his old axes. He gave me one so I could help him. We had a lot of fun with the axes. I remember once we spent a long time cutting brush and burning it, and then that night I went outside and started digging a tunnel under the crust.’

  I raked the dry grainy snow out from the hole and when I had a big pile I pushed it away.

  I did that for a long time with new snow falling on my face, licking at it and pulling more and more snow out of the hole. When the hole was deep enough so I could almost get in it, I put my head inside. It was dark and little grains of dry snow made falling noises as the sides of the tunnel caved in slowly.

  I ran inside to get a flashlight and propped it up in the snow so it was shining into the tunnel. Soon it was so long I had to get inside to keep digging. But I still had to be careful or the crust might break.

  After a while it was a regular cave. It was like a little house. The flashlight on the crust made it look like millions of diamonds in a snow palace. I pretended it was a long palace dance hall and Daddy and I were dancing with Mummy in a pretty white slip and the three of us danced around and around, and we were all happy. I was so happy I wanted to show them the sno
w cave. Very carefully, I crawled out and ran inside. ‘Mummy, Daddy, come and look at the house I made in the snow! Come and look!’

  ‘There was an incredible crust on the snow that day. It was so thick you could walk on it. After dinner, in the dark, I went outside and started digging a tunnel underneath the crust. The walls inside were soft snow. I ran back into the house to get a flashlight to help me dig and that is why I remember it. It was beautiful inside that white snow tunnel with sparkling cold walls of snow sliding around me as I scooped it out. Then I remember I heard a noise outside. It was snowing and underneath the light over the door I could see my father and mother standing in the doorway, watching me and laughing. I just think that is one of the nicest memories I have, of being in that hole and seeing my mother and father laughing at the way I must have looked to them.’

  I ran out ahead of them and crawled into the little snow house with the flashlight. When I got all the way inside I went all the way to the end of the tunnel and turned around slowly so that I could look out the round castle doorway and see the circle of light at the real door where Mummy and Daddy were standing in the doorway laughing. We were happy again together. It was snowing harder already and I had to squint to see them in between all the thousands of white snowflakes and I saw that Mummy had stopped laughing. She watched the snow fall and she looked very sad.

  In the middle of a sentence, Peter suddenly stopped talking. He stared into the fire. For a moment Ed thought he could feel Peter’s mind stumbling around in open darkness. After a few moments of silence, Peter stood up. He turned and walked quickly into the large dark bedroom that had been his parents’ and in a few minutes they heard him crying.